Attacks by “Anonymous” WikiLeaks Proponents not Anonymous

On November 28, 2010, the world started watching the whistle blower website WikiLeaks [1] to begin publishing part of the 250,000 US Embassy Diplomatic cables. These confidential cables provide an insight on U.S. international affairs from 274 different embassies, covering topics such as analysis of host countries and leaders and even requests for spying out United Nations leaders [2]. The release of these cables has caused reactions not only in the real world, but also on the Internet. In fact, a cyberwar started just before the initial release. Wikileaks has reported that their servers were experiencing distributed denial-ofservice attacks (DDoS) [3]. A DDoS attack consists of many computers trying to overload a server by firing a high number of requests, leading ultimately to service disruption. In this case, the goal was to avoid the release of the embassy cables. After the initial cable release, several companies started severed ties with WikiLeaks. One of the first was Amazon.com, that removed the WikiLeaks website from their servers [4]. Next, EveryDNS, a company in which the domain wikileaks.org was registered, dropped the domain entries from its servers. On December 4th, PayPal cancelled the account that WikiLeaks was using to receive